By Virginia Winder

One hundred years on from the 1881 invasion of Parihaka, a university student named Hazel Riseborough stands amid a sea of hurting people.

"The grief of the people was palpable and I wondered at the gap between the reality and the meagre accounts in the history books used in schools and universities," she writes in her revised version of Days of Darkness, released in 2002.

In person, she recalls that moment on 5 November 1981: "I stood there at Parihaka and I thought, 'What did the Government do here that was so powerful that it still resonates today, that it still moves these people in this way?'"

The scholar never imagined she would be the one to answer those questions.

Desire to speak Maori

With a background in agriculture and languages (she is fluent in Italian), Hazel decided to learn Maori extramurally through Massey University.

"At a certain point I realised I was only half a New Zealander if I didn't know anything about Maori culture, Maori language - the other side of our heritage," she explains.

"I'm a Kiwi with no other roots," she says.

Hazel's parents both came to New Zealand with their families after World War I, emigrating from England, a place that harboured harrowing memories for her dad. The war ended in 1918, and within six months Jack Riseborough had lost his mother, young brother and baby sister.

"My father was so traumatised by all this that he never spoke of England, never remembered England, had no connections back there. He knew why they'd left England and what this new life in New Zealand meant to him and I grew up in that sort of atmosphere."

But she wanted to know more about the country her father adopted with such fervour and so in 1973, Hazel began her Maori studies.

Scholar by degrees

"And gradually it started to look like a degree, which I hadn't intended to do at all," she says.

To complete her papers, she had to be on campus at Massey in Palmerston North.

There, she worked for Professor Ngatata Love, who had planned to write a book about Parihaka to coincide with the centenary of the invasion. He had done a great deal of research into the subject, but a career promotion deprived him of the time to complete the project.

Meanwhile, Hazel had performed so well in her Bachelor of Arts degree (Maori) that she was given a scholarship to do an honours degree in both Maori and History. She earned first-class honours in 1984 and was offered a further scholarship to do a PhD.

When she was considering topics for her doctoral thesis, Hazel's former professor came to her aid. "Ngatata said 'Away you go - there's the topic that I was going to work on'. But very soon I realised I couldn't use his topic. He had the right to tell the Parihaka story… he had his feet firmly planted on the mountain. I didn't."

But her mind kept flicking back to 1981 when she witnessed the lasting pain of the people at Parihaka. "I realised there were two sides to this story. What on earth was the other side? What had the Government done?"

Diving into documents

Hazel made it her thesis to find out.

It took her from November 1984 until October 1987 to complete her work.

For the first 18 months, she immersed herself into researching Government memos and telegrams. Slowly, the archival material began to paint a clear picture of what happened in Taranaki from 1878 to 1884.

As she worked, Hazel was forever mindful of how other New Zealand historians would greet her research. "They're standing out there with long knives, waiting to carve you up and you had to justify everything you said."

This stirred Hazel to be meticulous in investigations and she was so thorough she practically learnt the history off by heart.

But she had no idea how she would turn the information into a thesis. "Then I started to write - and it fair flowed out, chapter after chapter."

Sometimes, she was so involved in her work that the here and now vanished.

"I was writing in the 1980s and mostly I think I thought I was in the 1880s," she says. Being a woman of compassion, the scholar found the Government's actions and the blatant messages of British imperialism hard to stomach.

Making history happen

"There were times when I couldn't go on," she says. "Sometimes I just got to a knot and I couldn't see my way ahead and I would go walking down by the river and I'd walk and walk and I'd come back and somehow this knot would unravel itself and I'd go on.

"But when it came to the chapter, The Road to Parihaka, that was different, that was terribly clear, awfully clear."

Hazel began to believe she was creating history - literally.

"I felt that by telling the story I was making it happen. And I thought if I stopped... they'd get the message in Wellington that there was no hostility at Parihaka, no fortifications, no ill-will; they would get the message and they would stop what they were doing - those people in Wellington."

Always, she went back to the river: "...I'd walk up and down and I was crying and crying. And my feet would take me back home at a certain point and I'd be back up there in my study and I'd be writing and writing and writing and surprised to find myself back there, going on with this story; going on, making it happen."

Story of injustice reveals itself

Hazel says the stories of the land confiscations, of the arrested ploughmen, of the revered leaders, of the Parihaka plunder, were all there waiting to be released from the Government's documents, like a sculptor seeing shape within raw materials.

"...Michelangelo had a block of marble and David was imprisoned inside it and he chipped away anything that wasn't David until the figure came out of the block of marble," she says and flips to present tense.

"It's a bit like that with the documents…you've only got to discard the irrelevant bits and there's the story - let the documents speak for themselves, let the words of these people come through, let their opinions emerge from their writing. You don't have to embellish it and say how terrible it was, it's obviously terrible."

Hazel's task was to expose the truth, and she was shocked by what she found.

Telling telegrams

Telegrams between premier John Hall and attorney-general Frederick Whitaker revealed a determined plan to bring down Parihaka and its leaders of passive resistance, Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi.

They, and their followers, were standing in the way of settler expansion in Taranaki, and in particular they represented an alternative source of authority, and they had to be dealt with.

"The premier Hall, kept everything - all the incoming telegrams, all the outgoing telegrams - all their words are there," she says of the Hall papers in the National Archives.

And they were damning, particularly those between Hall and attorney-general Frederick Whitaker. "He sends a telegram to Whitaker saying, 'We've got to arrest Te Whiti, can you find an excuse by which we can do it?' And Whitaker replies, 'Well I can't, he's obeyed all the laws'."

At the time, Whitaker was reluctant to leave his speculative Maori land legal practice in Auckland to deal with Government business in Wellington, which became the capital in 1865. Kororareka (Russell) in the Bay of Islands, was named New Zealand's first capital in 1840, and in 1841 Auckland took over that role until the centre of power shifted to Wellington.

"So he's sitting up there in Auckland and Hall's sending him two or three telegrams a day and Whitaker's replying and they're all in the Hall papers - both the outgoing correspondence and the incoming correspondence," Hazel says.

Whitaker, who designed all the legislation, justified to England that the laws he was making were in the Maori's own best interests to save them from themselves. "Yet he says to his premier, 'I hope we can get Te Whiti under good British law and don't have to fall back on our own venial acts'," Hazel says.

Words pierce like iron spikes

These words, and others from people like Native Minister John Bryce, would make Hazel recoil.

"I can remember putting my hand up in front of my eyes, shielding my eyes as if there were iron spikes coming up out of the page and driving through my head, and I'm turning away from this terrible thing that I've seen - these words."

Hazel was amazed that the politicians recorded and saved all they said and wrote. "It's staggering that they were so righteous, so sure that Europeans were right and Maori were wrong, that they had the right to do this sort of thing.

"And even in Parliament they'd stand up and say, 'We would never get away with legislation like this if it concerned European land, but because it's Maori land we can get away with it'. They knew what they were doing."

Hazel wrote all her work by hand and on Sundays would retreat to the quiet of the nearly empty computer laboratory at Massey University to type up her thesis. "I was terrified I'd loose it. I'd never get the words again if I lost them."

To prevent fresh words from slipping her mind, Hazel always had a pencil and paper with her. She even placed them beside the bed for late-night moments of inspiration.

Pakeha scholar's role in history

Finally, Hazel's work fell into order; her thesis was complete. After sitting her oral exam in February 1988, and she received her doctorate three months later.

Days of Darkness was published by Allen & Unwin NZ on 17 May 1989 - the anniversary of Te Whiti's "days of darkness" speech. The second edition was released by Penguin Books in 2002.

But Hazel's Parihaka journey has taken her way beyond this book.

In 1992, the learned Pakeha scholar gave evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal during the Muru me te Raupatu claims. She was the one called upon to detail the Government's treatment of the Parihaka people; to help right past wrongs.

A few months later the Parihaka people asked her to present the first talk of the 1993 Parihaka Seminar series in Te Niho o Te Atiawa, where her evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal had been heard. The lecture was titled "Parihaka and the Historians".

Then seven years later they asked her to contribute an historical essay for the Art of Passive Resistance catalogue. The exhibition opened at Wellington's City Gallery on 26 August 2000 and Hazel gave the opening lecture.

Before the opening, she felt a need to visit Parihaka, to renew her bond with the place of passive resistance. So, she arranged to go on 18 and 19 August for a quiet time of remembering.

Break out the bread

Just by chance, Hazel's stay coincided with an historical moment - the Governor-General Sir Michael Hardie-Boys had chosen those days to visit Parihaka. Apart from Sir Paul Reeves, who has been there as a son of Parihaka, no other Governor-General had ever gone there on an official visit.

"The Parihaka people asked and asked and asked for the Governor to come to Parihaka, (but) the Governor never came," Hazel says, referring to those days of darkness.

On 18 August 2000, he did.

That momentous day, people were already gathered outside marae Te Paepae o Te Raukura waiting for the vice-regal party. Soon they spied the governor-general's car down outside another marae, Te Niho o Te Atiawa.

"We're waiting and waiting and finally this party starts to come up - not in the car, they left the car down there," Hazel says. "They started walking up to the marae led by kuia and young girls carrying bowls of bread, like the day of the invasion when they came carrying 500 loaves to feed their manuhiri - their visitors who were their invaders."

This day was one of peace on both sides.

"Here's the governor-general being led on by these people with white lace-edged cloths over these bowls of bread. It was the most moving thing - I just stood there and wept."

Hazel is unrepentant about being so emotional, for being moved by injustices.

She knows, in theory that history is meant to be objective. But, she tells her students: "If it was so objective, A, it would be that boring nobody would read it; and B, you wouldn't be able to stay in there and complete the job." 

She leans forward, fists clenched. "You've got to have fire in your belly. The material drives you, the story, the need for it, the realisation that, yes, it must be told and that you're in the position to tell it."

And, like the documents she used to research Days of Darkness, the truth is all there, just waiting to be revealed.